The Yosemite Valley (1910) by Galen Clark

DISCOVERY AND HISTORY OF
YOSEMITE VALLEY.

THE
Yosemite Valley was discovered
and made known to the public by
Major James D. Savage and Capt. John
Boling, who, with a strong detachment
of mounted volunteers from what was
known as the Mariposa Battalion, went
with friendly Indian guides to the Valley
in March, 1851, to capture the resident
tribe of Indians and put them on the
Fresno Indian Reservation.

The first improved trail for saddle
animals to Yosemite Valley was made
by a livery firm in Mariposa, the Mann
Brothers, in 1856. This trail led from
Mariposa to the Valley by way of the
South Fork of the Merced River, crossing
the stream at a point now known as
Wawona.

In 1857 the regular tourist travel to
Yosemite Valley may be said to have
commenced, although a few persons had
gone there in previous years since its
discovery. All parties, at that time,
went prepared with camping outfits.

The first house in Yosemite was built
in the fall of the year 1856, and was
opened the next spring as a saloon for
the entertainment of that class of visitors
who loved whiskey and gambling.
The next year it was fitted up and used
as a restaurant. Several years later it
was enlarged, and known as Black’s
Hotel.

The first building erected for a hotel
was built in 1859, and is now a part of
the Sentinel Hotel premises, being known
as the Cedar Cottage.

Most of the early visitors to Yosemite
were Californians, and the number did
not amount to one thousand in any one
season until the completion of the Union
Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads.

All the necessary supplies for the
hotels and other purposes were taken
into the Valley by pack mules from
Coulterville and Mariposa, a distance of
fifty miles, until the completion of the
first wagon roads in 1874.

The main features and great variety of
Yosemite scenery were early and widely
made known throughout the civilized
world by pen, press, and public speech,
and have been many times portrayed by
paint brush, camera and kodak; but no
description, painting or photograph can
give its vivid, thrilling, overwhelming
life expression.

The officers in command of the military
expedition. which discovered Yosemite
Valley in 1851, in their report to Governor
McDougal, estimated the height of
the most prominent parts of the walls
around the valley at from twelve hundred
to fourteen hundred feet. This is
about the height that most visitors estimate
them as they see them on entering
the Valley. When the actual heights
were ascertained by civil engineers, with
surveyor’s transit, they were found to
be more than double the heights estimated
by the unaided eye.

Jarvis Kiel of Mariposa was the first
engineer to make some of the actual
heights known. He was followed by
Prof. J. D. Whitney, State Geologist,
with his assistant engineers. Still later
came Capt. Wheeler and Lieut. McComb
of the United States Engineering Department.
There is very little variation
in all these reported heights.